Time memory and place

“The tract of country in view may have no obvious structure, but its form is not therefore a matter of chance. In point of fact, every landscape is a highly developed mechanical system, the forms and curves of which are obedient to strict mathematical laws. The buttresses of the hills, the levels at their feet, the corrugations of the valleys—all these have, with the passage of time, assumed forms perfectly adapted to their internal structure and materials. The rambler is not in the least concerned with the mathematics of physical processes, but he is with their results, and every detail he observes yields up its story to him. For him, 'the hills, rock-ribbed, and ancient as the sun,' are no haphazard heaps of stone and earth, but the very framework of scenery. Their individual forms give life and meaning to the landscape as a whole, and it is in the landscape as a whole that it is the ramblers art to perceive”.

Walter Shepherd ‘The Living Landscape of Britain’.

The inspiration is the quotation from J. B. Jackson, "Landscape is history made visible". Jackson (1909-1996), was an American cultural geographer who wrote many thoughtful things about how people relate to the places where they live, work, and travel. Focusing not on land as ecosystems but on landscape as land shaped by human presence, Jackson insists in his writings that the workaday world gives form to an essential sense of place, which is required for the day to day well being of humankind. The project is an offshoot of an on-line community wiki created to raise the landscape awareness of people living in a small area of the county of Suffolk www.blything.wikispaces.com and is part of the Cosmos project aimed at producing an on-line multisicipline educational framework for sustainable world development www.culturalecology.info/cosmos
.
In particular Time Memory and Place is a local practical approach to Prelinger and Shaw’s ‘Landscape coin project’, which was based on the idea that in the everyday places of the countryside and city, we may discern texts embedded in scenery that are capable of revealing important truths about society and culture, present and past. These they marked by dropping a coin for others to discover and ponder about. Views singled out from a wide topographic context contain subtle clues about the place’s history. Smaller pictures from the original image focus on particular objects, unfolding a story of the landscape’s history, as if it were written on the land. Old stumps, derelict walls, field undulations and trees, take on new meaning. For example, for a woodland, the age and cause of tree scars and the size of rocks in stone walls tell of past land use, while the variety of tree species and sizes links the site to changing patterns of agriculture and industry. This is a combination of science and storytelling in a picture using the themes of time memory and place.

‘Time Memory and Place’ is an attempt to recognize and gather still and moving digital images of places that the observers think deserve attention and thought. Prelinger and Shaw’s standpoint is that we commit some sites to memory because they are rich with memory. Some mark the location of major or minor, but significant, historical or cultural events. Other sites are contested places - places where people have fought for ownership or control of land, resources, or communities. Places are to be chosen simply because they might reveal something about the evolving relationship between human beings and the world they inhabit or once inhabited.

During the late 1960's through to the '70s, there was an emphasis on landscape assessment to produce 'objective' and quantitative methods of attaching a numerical value for the 'subjective' responses to aesthetic or scenic quality. These methods were developed to act as evaluative tools to enable an assessment to be repeated by different observers, or carried out in different areas and still produce comparable results. That is landscape analysis was expected to give reliable and consistent information about the observers' responses to landscape quality. Landscape in itself is difficult to value objectively. Increasingly this value is also being realised in economic terms, with the overt marketing of landscape for tourism and as a pleasant place for recreation or living.

In contrast, Time Memory and Place sees ‘Landscape’ neither as the work of artists or architects nor as a scene necessarily marked by the beauty of nature. But much of what is valued is a melange of natural features and social and cultural history, which is highly evocative and thus idiosyncratically important to people. The poignancy of this is outwardly reflected in art, poetry and song, and inwardly in a sense of pride in kinship with place, belonging and comfort, all reinforcing this feeling of 'personal value'.

Landscape means more than just natural beauty. It also means human habitat - the living, ever-changing, record of human life, work and leisure. Our everyday landscape is largely unplanned and accidental. It may not be orderly or beautiful to every eye, but that does not give us an excuse to ignore what we are facing and move on. We are makers of the landscape around us, and the landscape we inhabit influences the shape of our lives and our view of ourselves.

Viewers value and question what they see in their own way, and at the same time consider how the place has been valued by others. Are land and landscape ultimately properties, commodities to be bought and sold? Or, in the final analysis, do they belong to all of us? How does an ordinary, everyday landscape like a highway or an abandoned industrial tract compare in value to a venerated historical site or a pleasant suburban neighhourhood? And who is it, anyway, that decides the value of the images we carry in our minds?

Essentially ‘Time Memory and Place’ is the assembly of an archive of digital images where it is not the collection itself that matters but rather the social order they represent. In the future, image stewardship may no longer be the exclusive province of institutions such as museums and libraries, and may soon be accomplished in part through the work of interested individuals as they contribute t, and define, their personal collections. Collectors play their their role as the creators and sustainers of objectified cultural capital. In this respect, the Internet environment strongly encourages the appropriation of still and moving images for projecting new new messages. This new kind of on-screen gallery, which in theory functions on democratic principles, considers moving images, along with most other types of cultural heritage material, to be both the taxonomy and the building blocks of creative acts or acts of public speech. Karen Gracy has argued that it ‘represents a new model for creating an archive; this new democratic archive documents and facilitates social discourse’.

J B Jackson
J.B. Jackson (1909-1996), writer, teacher, and explorer, shared his delight in studying the ordinary aspects of the everyday landscape. Jackson graduated from Harvard in 1932 with a B.A. in History and Literature. After college, Jackson spent several years motorcycling across Europe and eventually serving as an intelligence officer in WWII. In 1951, Jackson created Landscape, a magazine dedicated to the study of the vernacular landscape. He focused both on the U.S. as a region and on smaller regions such as the Spanish-American settlements of New Mexico. Jackson's poetic writings inspired many Americans to see the landscape with a new perspective.

During a long and distinguished career he brought about a new understanding and appreciation of the American landscape. Hailed in 1995 by New York Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp as "America's greatest living writer on the forces that have shaped the land this nation occupies," Jackson founded Landscape Magazine in 1951, taught at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley, and wrote nearly 200 essays and reviews. This appealing anthology of his most important writings on the American landscape, illustrated with his own sketches and photographs, brings together Jackson's most famous essays, significant but less well known writings, and articles that were originally published unsigned or under various pseudonyms. Jackson founded himself not only in an outsider myth but developed also what Emerson called ‘self-culture,’ especially in the claim that his teaching was centred not in scholarship but only in self-experience.

As an editor, Jackson defied disciplinary boundaries. His magazine generated a constituency of architects, historians, geographers, folklorists, sociologists, city planners, journalists, and others. These readers and the authors that Jackson published did not share a methodology, but instead found common ground in a belief that insights into culture, history, and ideology could be reaped through close attention to the spaces constructed, used, and populated by everyday Americans. Jackson and his cohorts, whom geographer Jay Appleton dubbed the “landscape movement,” viewed the countryside as a palimpsest upon which layers of meaning had been inscribed throughout history.

Material and spiritual values

On inauguration day 2009, President Obama announced the goal of "restoring science to its rightful place" while, in the same speech, acknowledging that nonbelievers are citizens of the nation in the same way as followers of religion. Thus the debate has already begun as regards the formation of different selfhoods required for the New America.

Is "belief in belief" a good thing? Is there merit in Stephen Jay Gould's assertion that religion and science form "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA) which address two independent ways of arriving at truth? Isn't it now time for a discussion about whether science and belief are indeed compatible? The debate is best organised within our perceptions and understanding of nature. This means it has to be within the personalised spaces of the urbanised world we distinguish from all others and describe as 'landscape', whether gardens, parks, nature sites or wilderness.

The phenomena associated with these landscapes that lie visibly beyond the naming and listing of the plants and animals can acquire extra significance when transformed by an imagination and skill. This is the opposite side of beauty's coin; the beauties of nature are counterbalanced by works of art expressed as pictures, literature, music, dance, design, and architecture. Somewhere in the middle is the protected nature site and the garden, which are both managed by the application of ecological science. The aim of conservation management is to maintain valued features of habitats and species because of their rarity or vulnerability to human materialistic activities. The gardener, no matter her scale of operation also uses science but the a pattern of colours and textures that just looks right, it the goal of art.

The big question facing people dominated by a material world is whether there is a philosophical incompatibility between religion and science in making sense of nature. Does the empirical method of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two institutions must be considered essentially antagonistic?

Nature lives in our surroundings, in ourselves and in the molecular connections and spiritual links we imagine between the two. How people manipulate, write about, and picture their surroundings gives valuable insights into the intimate relationships people have with the environment.

The Taoists wrote about unobstructed rivers and streams as a model for harmonious living. The development of the typical Chinese garden with its full yin-yang symbolism was essentially Taoist in origin. The Han Emperors had earlier created vast artificial landscapes or parks with mountains, ravines, forests, rivers, lakes and open spaces to provide a habitat for hordes of game for hunting.

During the time of the Six Dynasties and the T'ang, Taoists developed the quiet intimacy of the small-scale garden, intended to reflect heaven on earth. It became a symbol of Paradise where all life was protected and sheltered. The Imperial parks had been given over to the grandiose, the artificial, extravagant and luxurious, to the hunter and aggressor; the Taoist gardens were created as places of naturalness and simplicity. They were havens for the sage, scholar and rambling nature lover. In a well-designed Taoist garden it should be difficult to distinguish between the work of man and Nature and pass smoothly from nature to man's Inner Universe of the Human's Body. The Inner Universe shows Taoist practitioners in a very abstract way, all of the necessary points in the human's "inner" body, and the roles these areas play in the practice of Taoist Internal Alchemy. The Inner Universe is seen by the Taoist Adept as one of mountains, rivers, streams, lakes, pools, trees, sun, moon and stars -- a complete microcosm of the vast outer macrocosm we call our Universe. Taoists follow the art of "wu wei", which is to achieve action through minimal action. It is the metaphorical practice of going against the stream not by struggling against it and thrashing about, but by standing still and letting the stream do all the work. Thus the sage knows that relative to the river, he still moves against the current. To the outside world the sage appears to take no action - but in fact he takes action long before others ever foresee the need for action. The European Romantics, many centuries later, found in the idea of nature as wilderness an important corrective to the distorted values that had infiltrated society through the application of science for a better life. Sitting still and staying quiet in a wilderness can be a hard test. But the Taoist saying, “I have nothing to do and no place to go,” may be applied. When you sit quietly for extended periods of time you begin noticing things. Birds swoop in, fluttering from bush to bush looking for the scarce berry or two. Squirrels move cautiously from branch to branch betrayed only by the twitching of their tails. And if you’re lucky a deer will suddenly appear from nowhere. These are sights, sounds, odours and natural movements that have their place in the turbulence of nature. Like the Taoist thinker standing against the stream. you can stand and let nature do the work.

Even the least soulful among us is likely to find in nature an antidote to something - whether duplicity, or repression, or commercialism, or just plain stress. The idea of nature as a contemplative cosmos does not contradict the less spiritual concept of nature as beautiful landscape, with all its teeming fauna. At one end of the spectrum of perception of nature, landscape satisfies the aesthetic sense; at the other end, we see it as the intricate workings of watches and clock, and start to speculate on where and how the watchmaker has come to be. Somewhere in the middle "delightful" shifts to "awesome" and the notion of the ‘Sublime’ takes root, with overtones of humanity's littleness and ineffectiveness against a global or cosmic backdrop of endless space and time. With regards the spectrum of scale, awe is a response to landscapes whilst delight it taken in gardens. Britain is often portrayed as ‘a nation of gardeners’ - it is the most popular national pastime. In the summer months two-thirds of adults in the UK are regular gardeners. In rural and urban areas gardens attached to dwellings are a significant, ‘everyday’ element in a range of landscapes, spaces and terrains. When gardening, people shape and co-create their everyday landscape literally, through ‘mixing with the earth’ and out of this comes both selfhood and the expression of selfhood.


Between the points of the equilateral triangle that is conceived as landscape - self, nature and art - complex energies playfully, movingly and profoundly interact. It is no accident that the "mystery of creation" is an ambiguous phrase. In their overtones of mood and meaning, the words succinctly encapsulate the theme of Time Memory and Place. The aim is to make it a gathering of quotations and explanations from different regions, ages and traditions, attached to digital images of actual landscapes. The latter are doors through which to travel inwardly and relish the experience of a cross-disciplinary world view of nature.

In a natural worldview, there is no non-natural or supernatural. There is only the natural and mysteries left to explain through natural means. Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism.

Nature conservation and the beauty response

A visual art form such as a drawing, painting, photograph, sculpture or etching can be the summit at a mountaintop of information, the Rosetta Stone dictionary for deciphering complex problems in all languages here on earth and throughout the Universe. Long before the invention of the written word to preserve and convey information, people painted and carved pictures (petroglyphs) on walls of caves and cliffs for all to understand, both then and many thousands of years later. The act of inscribing information by any means and the storage of it in libraries for retrieval made it possible to have a cultural evolution by which humans learned how to over-power and manipulate all other forms of life, including other humans. Visual art can convey more than just words. Like music, it can convey emotions from the heart. W.C. Galinat.

Biophilia was the term used by E.O.Wilson to describe the connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life. He was making the point that every scrap of wildness, even a fenced fragment of a former vast wilderness or a roadside grassy verge, nurtures the scientific and spiritual behaviours that lie dormant within us.

Alone in the tropical forest, Wilson says, "...summoned fresh images from the forest of how real organisms look and act I needed to concentrate for only a second and they came alive as eidetic images, behind closed eyelids, moving across fallen leaves and decaying humus. I sorted the memories this way and that in hope of stumbling on some pattern not obedient to abstract theory of textbooks. I would have been happy with any pattern. The best of science doesn't consist of mathematical models and experiments, as textbooks would make it seem. Those come later. It springs fresh from a more primitive mode of thought wherein the hunter's mind weaves ideas from old facts and fresh metaphors and the scrambled crazy images of things recently seen. To move forward is to concoct new patterns of thought, which in turn dictate the design of the models and experiments. Easy to say, difficult to achieve"

We think more carefully and philosophically about human origins and our destiny as a species, when in contact with a variety of even the most commonplace living things. Biophilia settles peace on the soul particularly where the gathering of species is in a landscape beyond human contrivance, and there can be no purpose more enspiriting than protecting and expanding the wondrous diversity of life. This is not just a quality of vast wilderness areas, but it is also to be found in an English hedgerow, where a handful of trees and shrubs create a wilful tangle of biodiversity.

Wildness, large and small was put into the context of valuing the natural world as a beauty experience by Rachel Carson and Albert Einstein.

Those who dwell...among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. . . Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction. RC

A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and this alone, I am a deeply religious man. AE

These are actually powerful statements of naturalistic pantheism, which draws ethical conclusions from the intuitive feelings that there are spiritual values in all the entities that conservationists describe as ‘features’ in their management plans. Pantheists believe that nature itself deserves our feelings of reverence and awe. For the pantheist, nothing is more worthy of reverence, or even worship, than the awesome power and beauty of the cosmos itself. Pantheism caters to the emotional need that many people feel for so-called "spiritual (as opposed to materialistic) values"; a need to value something beyond themselves or that even transcends the human race.

Pantheism offers ways of expressing these feelings in ceremonies, celebrating significant times and places, which underline our links with nature, the solar system and the universe. The message is that humans should seek a closer spiritual harmony with nature. All this is possible without retreating one millimetre from the rigorously empirical attitude to reality found in modern science. We should preserve biodiversity and the delicately beautiful ecological balances of the planet, not just as a matter of survival, but as a matter of personal fulfilment. All of this is encompassed in a pictorial language of biophilia, which, in terms of personalities ranges from the evocative streams of migrating wildfowl in Peter Scott’s paintings of wetland landscapes, back to Bewick’s 18th century woodcuts illustrating Aesops Fables. It is now testified and endorsed by humanity through the countless digital photographs of wildlife and habitats of nature reserve, that are accumulating in family web albums world wide.

Incorporating spiritual objectives into management plans
It is now commonplace to find that biodiversity is considered to be a valuable human resource. Biodiversity is the repository of a rich array of species, both animal and plant, aquatic and terrestrial. In a social setting biodiversity provides ethical, spiritual, and moral grounds for protecting all forms of life and with monetary rewards for doing so.

Spiritual understanding is triggered by emotions from the heart, such as the yearning for transcendence, inwardness, the experience of oneness, happiness, meaning in life and rituals. We need models, both inside and outside official religious groups, that bring spirituality into nature conservation to help explain the origins and future of humanity. In other words, spirituality has less to do with religion than with becoming a person in the truest sense. The spiritual core is the deepest centre of the person. It has been said that it is here that a person is open to the transcendent dimension; it is here that the person experiences the other side of subjective reality. Science, is the way we know natural features, but spirituality provides the way we know them to be there. This is why spirituality an important part of understanding what it is to be human and why it is an important quality to protect and promote. This spiritual, creative environmental structure turns up in various guises throughout human history; in mysticism; in ancient oracles; in African tribal dance and ritual; in all religious and spiritual experience; and throughout mythology. Its most recent genuine or ‘authentic' manifestation is in the advent of modern abstract art, as practised in its purest sense by artists such as Kandinsky, Mondrian, Rothko, De Kooning, and others.

Viewing of a work of art takes place in the context, not of the subject matter, but of the pictorial language used by the artist. The viewer of a work of art is struck by the work as conveying an immediate visual experience, as was the maker, who was faced with the visual experience of the real world. In both cases people as artists or viewers cannot resist the need to hold, through graphic or painterly means, a figure, a face or a view that strikes their feelings. These feelings can be pleasurable or not depending on the context of cognition. Providing views of nature is therefore an important objective of nature conservation, particularly in relation to activating ‘a painter’s eye’, in visitors, not only artists but also the general public.

In 1984, the Australian national committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites adopted guidelines for the establishment of the cultural significance of conservation, to accompany their Burra Charter. The guidelines include a section titled "Social value", which reads, "Social value embraces the qualities for which a place has become a focus of spiritual, political, national or other cultural sentiment to a majority or minority group." Although the word "sentiment" may not adequately capture what for some peoples is a deeply held belief, this was the first reference to spiritual values in any national or international conservation document.

The logic of making a conservation plan for a nature site begins with identifying the features that have to be safeguarded. This is followed by defining the factors to be managed in order to maintain the features in a favourable state or condition. Features are typically the habitats or species for which the area is being protected, but they may also be geological, archaeological or landscape elements. Other features of a site that have to be managed are those structures and procedures concerned with public access, tourism, relations with the local community and the on-site facilities (like a visitors centre).

Each feature has a measurable objective, which defines the operational target of management. An objective is often expressed as a one line statement. For instance "Maintain this feature (e.g a named plant) at favourable conservation status". In this case, the measurable target could be the number of plants in a given area. When expressed numerically, the target is also a performance indicator, because by monitoring the plant population year on year, the effectiveness of the management procedure may be assessed.

It is essential to define objectives in this scientific way for management to be effective and efficient. However, most visitors to a nature site encounter its features visually. This opens up another way of defining a feature’s management objective by using pictorial language. For example, the following statement defines the visual objective of the Broads Authority regarding the management of stonewort, a water plant that is very sensitive to pollution.

"A carpet of stonewort species covers the bed of the shallow lake. This continuous lawn stretches across much of lake area; it may be dominated by only a few stonewort species, such as the intermediate, starry or rough stonewort, or be composed of a mix of several stonewort and pondweed species. During the growing season there will be sufficient submerged plant material to out-compete microscopic algae for nutrients resulting in crystal clear water.

Gazing through this clear water the muted green delicate starry tips of intermediate stonewort can be seen stretching across much of the deeper lake area. On closer inspection other species, such as the baltic and starry stoneworts or flat-stalked pondweed can be picked out by their fresh green colours and different shape.

The stonewort roots stabilise the deep soft lake sediment by forming dense lawns of roots, intertwining stems and branches. It requires some force to push an oar diagonally through them and they are crunchy to touch as a result of calcium incorporated into their stems and branches. At peak height, in July and August, intermediate stonewort lawns will be near water surface having a calming effect on the sometimes turbulent water of the broad. These calm waters may create exceptionally clear water areas within the lake.

Where the water shallows into the gravel lake margins the species may change from open water lawns rooted into the deep sediment, to shorter lawns of the rough and convergent stoneworts.

The stoneworts provide the backdrop for the underwater drama, rather like a dense rainforest canopy. The many snails and other small water creatures living on the towering stems and amongst the branches, provide the protein for fish, which is essential if they are to live long and grow large. Water creatures, such as snails, also eat the algae that threaten to clog the stems of the stonewort, thus allowing the plant to breathe and get light.

Stoneworts can be found in the broad all year round and although the height of the lawn will naturally decrease in the winter it will still provide a welcome food source for water birds such as gadwell, golden eye, pochard and coot which congregate in their thousands. From the stems that remain through winter, new shoots will grow when the temperature increases in the spring. The amount of underwater light never hinders the growth of this species. In some years stoneworts will produce abundant orange and yellow seeds, which can be found in the sediment close to the parent plant.

Over time or space, should the intermediate stonewort lawns recede and other stoneworts and pondweeds, which are also are characteristics of low nutrient conditions, colonise the open water, this will be welcomed as part of the natural succession at this site".

A well written statement in pictorial language is one of the easiest ways to communicate to the public just what the conservation manager is trying to do on a site. The more imaginatively written these statements are, the easier it becomes to understand the management objectives non-scientifically.

Defining pictorial language.

In a wider context, science is returning to an understanding that images, not words, are the basis of thought. That is to say, verbal language is not so much the foundation of thought, but a more abstract framework of mental processing. Therefore words supplemented by pictures and sometimes pictures by themselves, could be better suited as vehicles for communicating thought, than words alone. Although pictorial communication is seldom entirely successful if not accompanied by words, and any visual language needs the written background of convention, pictures can indeed function as natural symbols, due to their resemblance to the objects and facts represented. Furthermore, precisely because they resemble what they represent, pictures are eminently suited for conveying visual information. However, in the past, the employment of pictures for the communication of knowledge was impeded by the limited means for the creation and duplication of graphics. This has changed dramatically with the new capabilities of computers, and the development of iconic languages can now be realized, because of the ubiquity of devices for multimedia messaging. It is in the context of computer technology that messages about conservation management are now being formulated and communicated.

There are four ways of communicating the state of a nature conservation feature; as a textual description in prose/poetry, as a numerical attribute; as an annotated scientific diagram; as a photograph, and as a painting. At the same time as delineating the pictorial forms of communication, it is important to distinguish an ‘image’ from ‘a work of art’.

Scientific illustration is a rich and wide field for creative activity. It ranges from line drawings, through qualititative mixed-media drawings visualizing concepts of the directly accessible or non-accessible natural world, to the quantitive, highly technical plotting of (numerical) data. Scientific illustration is often characterized by a twofold need: for accuracy and for clarity in presenting information. The role of the scientific illustrator is to record and communicate nature and science with pencil or brush. A keen eye is needed to pick out detail and omit the irrelevant, making the image convey the essential attributes of the subject. Complex diagrams, cutaways and charts combine art with design, while a scientist's eye for detail and an artist's creative flair, result in unique and fascinating works.

Scientific illustrations are produced as part of the process of understanding an object, which can be any one of the natural features of a nature site. The first step in cognition is a process of visual discernment, whereby the feature is contemplated separately from the background and so enters the viewers memory. One can of course interpret a feature without sensing it, without really seeing it, by using it as a document, by carrying it through analogies and so forth, in order to enter a lengthy cultural discourse. The production of a photograph or a painting of the feature is also a response to its discernment, and these images are made either as a memory/record of what was actually seen, or to capture the cascade of varied emotions which was triggered by the act of discernment. The former may be described as passive cognition and the latter as active cognition. Active cognition triggers assocations determined by past experiences. At the basic scientific level active cognition is defined by interest. That is to say, the view raises material questions, such as why it looks the way it does. This curiosity lies behind the phrase ‘nature conservation interest’ which is used to justify the scientific conservation of habitats and species, where the motivation is the functional existence of these features as parts of a larger ecosystem. In this way conservationists project objective meaning into species and ecosystems by framing them in scientific systems. For a non-scientist the act of active discernment of colour, shape and form in the features of a nature reserve, commonly provokes the recognition of beauty as a pleasurable quality or aggregate of qualities in a thing. This may lead to the production of a work of art which is subsequently viewed by others who may have never visited the site.

In the context of the appreciation of nature, beauty is understood to be a subjective experience and not a fundamental property of an object. Therefore, different features of a nature site may create the beauty experience in different people. These experiences may be generated from the surface form of things, or by an awareness of the inner workings of them as biological, physical and social systems.

Inner beauty is a concept used to describe the positive aspects of something that is not physically observable. For example, human qualities including kindness, sensitivity, tenderness, compassion, creativity and intelligence have been said to be desirable since antiquity. No matter at what level it is generated, a common reaction to beauty is that the experience is pleasing and makes us feel good. The commonality of beauty is that a beautiful object resonates with personal meaning, and generates a craving and desire to maintain contact with it. The qualities of beauty are balance, harmony, rhythm and proportion. These qualities are all relational, dynamic and contextual. Therefore nothing can be beautiful for ever. There are some who believe that beauty is the key principle, the master key in reordering our values and systems- in economics, in governance, in education. In fact, we should seek beauty in every human activity. It usually begins with the senses and can cascade into our feelings and emotions, where it can move us at all levels of consciousness and spirituality.

The complexity of the visual response to a small area of landscape is evident from H. J. Massingham’s description of English downland.

…. it is the foreground which absorbs the watcher. He sees in it a combination of four qualities which makes the scene before him an epitome of the open Berkshire Downs- length of line and beadth of surface, wildness and nakedness at one with the finish of composition and a texture of the turf which gives a kind of bloom to those broad shoulders. The music of linear continuity is here expressed in a single transcendent chord. Many times I have watched the scene and felt its music. H J Massingham English Downland

The following description by Helen Charman of Matisse’s cutout picture entitled Vegetation, demonstrates how far the idea of a beauty response to the ‘fecundity of nature’, which is regarded by many as a God given bounty, can be taken into abstract pictorial language. It illustrates the formal pleasure that may be derived from the unfolding of the pictorial syntax which carries a subject or a theme.

“The vegetation is represented as series of motifs or signs rather than realistically, and the work is compartmentalised to enclose a simple pictorial language of motifs reduced to a simplified vocabulary of orbs, ovums and palm-leaf shapes. These shapes, when read in relation to each other, are suggestive of the fecundity of nature. The work plays down its representational function and asserts its physical components. It becomes an object in its own right, with the pictorial language of the vegetable motifs referring to each other as much as to real vegetables. This is characteristic of the visual language employed by modern art, which defines an object like no other; one that relates to the real world but nevertheless remains separate from it, an autonomous object”.


A similar poetic syntax is also a pictorial device to express the beauteous spirituality of wetland by the Irish poet John O’Donohue

Decorum
In the winter night
By the lake edge
A stern breeze makes
The young novices
Of reed bend
Low and bow
To the mystery
Of a shadow-mountain
Gathered the moment
The cloud freed the moon.